As in Bugs Bunny’s on my butt, in band aid form. Peggy, one of the nurses at Swedish Cancer Institute, put it there after she gave me a Lupron shot. This one is good for three months instead of one month like the two previous shots. I can feel the difference. I also have a Daffy Duck band aid on my upper left arm. Peggy also gave me a flu shot. I have a simple gauze and paper tape dressing over the inner bend of my elbow. That’s from my blood draw. The phlebotomists are old school. Too bad because if they’d given me a Porky Pig band aid I would have had a Warner Brothers’ trinity on my left side.

Last but not least, I have gauze and dressing over the small portion of missing skin on my breast. I found out yesterday that I lost all of the skin in a little area. Dr. Welk told me that what I had been looking at and thinking was deeper skin was actually subcutaneous fat. That was mildly disconcerting since I was unaware that I had been peering at a deeper layer of my insides all this time. He also told me that the skin would heal from the edges in by forming a bridge over the wound. That skin will not form connections to the fat below, however, He did say that the area had revascularized (the blood supply has returned to the area) and the tissue was granulated (a stage of tissue healing), which are good things.

Overall, Dr. Welk was happy with how things were proceeding so he added a bunch of saline to my tissue expander. He did, however, recommend that I have about a square centimeter of skin grafted from my abdomen to my breast. In his usual way he said, “It’s no big deal. It’s just a pinch of skin. It will take less than 20 minutes.” I was feeling brave so I said, “Dr. Welk, last time you told me something was only going to take 5 minutes, it hurt like Hell.” He said, “This won’t even hurt like Heck.” “How about Purgatory?,” I pressed. “Not even like Purgatory. No big deal.”

So I agreed. I met with Dr. Rinn for my medical oncology appointment and she also said she thought it was a good idea because it would reduce risk of infection. So I had a good appointment with her, got my shots, scheduled my next appointment for next January (yay, three months away!), and went home.

This afternoon, I’m going to see if Dr. Welk is right about this little “no big deal” skin graft. If he’s wrong, I’m not just going to give him Heck, I’m going to give him Hell! 🙂

George Lakoff has retired as Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is now Director of the Center for the Neural Mind & Society (cnms.berkeley.edu).